Individualization and Individualism: Facets and Turning Points of the Entrepreneurial Self among Young People in Italy

Introduction

The aim of this article is to show how young people deal with the social injunction to be active and creative individuals. By considering the voices of young people living in Milan, we explore, on the one hand, how individualization as a historical process becomes a goal and an ongoing accomplishment, part of the ‘common sense’ that young people use to describe themselves and interpret their experience. On the other hand, we analyse how, and to what extent, individualization and individualism intertwine, when and how they conflict with each other, and how situational and individual characteristics affect the capacity to imagine and enact new forms of social relationships. In this way, we suggest, it is possible to highlight how individualization is, at the same time, a form of self-discipline and a way in which individuals can find self-fulfilment, and try to make sense of their experience by also devising new forms of cooperation and sharing. We are interested in analysing how young people – raised amid the pervasive neoliberal rhetoric of the importance of being proactive and creative – put into practice, in their interactions with others, the injunction to focus on developing personal skills; but also how – in spite of a desire for autonomy transformed into self-management – individualization can be tackled with new forms of sociation.

In the following sections, we first situate ourselves in the current sociological debate on individualization, clarifying the distinction between individualization and individualism; we then present the setting of our research and describe the different ways in which the interviewees experienced individualization with respect to the hegemonic neoliberal cultural pattern of the ‘entrepreneurial self’. In the concluding section, we discuss how individualization can be related to an idea of sharing and acting in concert with others, avoiding a restrictive homology between individualization and individualism.

Framing Individualization

Individualization is a long-standing process in western society. We can say, following Tocqueville (1835) in Democracy in America, that it is one of the pillars of modern society. It puts, in an innovative manner in human history, strong emphasis on the importance of the single individual, of her/his rights, opinions and tastes. Through the Enlightenment and economic liberalism, the institutionalization of the individual as the basis for the project of constructing oneself as one’s own masterpiece, was considered one of the aspects that marked the emergence of modernity itself.

In analytical terms, individualization has recently been viewed as the never-ending process of becoming an individual (Bauman, 2001; Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Giddens, 1990; Melucci, 1996). In this perspective, individualization is a structural and historical phenomenon: it is imposed on the individual by modern institutions (Beck, 2007), even though in post-industrial society it has become a non-linear process of transformation no longer with stable bases such as the welfare state, the family, the school or a specific profession. The term ‘individualization’ is intended to stress that individuals are forced, by the logic itself of modernization, to make themselves the masters of their own destinies, to become self-reflexive, constantly monitoring their actions and to perceive their actions and destiny as consequences of their choices rather than as consequences of social structural forces (Atkinson, 2010a). This highlights the ambivalence that characterizes the current process of individualization: it is, at the same time, a structural constraint and an injunction to overcome structural constraints. On the one hand, individualization signals the affirmation of the idea that self-determination, resourcefulness and autonomy have become social skills essential for acting successfully and obtaining the desired results. On the other hand, it refers to the precariousness, risk and uncertainty within which one is forced to act and that undermine the conditions for independent life plans (Sennett, 1998). The most commonly suggested way out of these ambivalent institutionalized injunctions is to insist shortsightedly and reproachfully on self-responsibility (Trnka and Trundle, 2014). Thus, individualization becomes a way to construct oneself in an unpredictable environment, where the emphasis on merits and personal skills becomes largely supported by current neoliberal culture: ‘Social critique is transformed into self-critique, resulting in a prevalence of self-doubt and anxiety. Competition too seems to be self-directed, suggesting that entrepreneurial subjects compete with the self, and not just with others’ (Scharff, 2016: 108).

The connection with the neoliberal idea of the free-market individual highlights a specific psychologized, internalized, aspect of individualization ‘built around cultivating the “right” kind of disposition for surviving in neoliberal society: aspiration, confidence, resilience’ (Gill, 2017: 610), to which we can add creativity, risk-taking and the myth of individual achievement. In this regard, scholars have highlighted how subjectivities re-elaborated under neoliberalism foster the development of an ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Bröckling, 2016; Du Gay, 1996; Rose, 1992) characterized by creativity, innovation, flexibility, willingness to take risks and the capacity to assume responsibility for oneself and one’s choices. In this case, individualization is a form of discipline and control, one of the main dimensions of neoliberal governmentality, engaged in replacing a ‘homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself’ (Foucault, 2008: 226).

Confidence in personal capacities has acquired the role of a moral value and a criterion of justness. Faced with uncertainty concerning work, a credible path to achieving autonomy, a certain degree of emotional, professional and economic security, young people are encouraged to work on themselves, to cultivate creativity, ‘employability’ and ‘soft skills’ (Colombo and Rebughini, 2019a; Farrugia, 2018). Public agencies – education systems, employment services, welfare state – private enterprises, political and media discourses, experts, relatives, friends and guidebooks encourage and oblige young people to seek self-sufficiency and self-realization, acquire skills and formal qualifications, be responsive, active and lead a healthy lifestyle (Börner et al., 2020; Kelly, 2013). As Bröckling (2016) notes, the subject has to become an expert of oneself and a self-initiating participant of the market in a ‘contract society’.

While individuals are taught ‘to be active and creative, to show initiative and to believe optimistically in the success of personal efforts’, they are also asked to ‘submit to the fateful order of the market that regularly and increasingly fails and frustrates the efforts of the many’ (Rehmann, 2013: 287). Personal skills, capacity to act and the ability to take advantage of opportunities are considered to be indispensable moral qualities of an individual and they have become a philosophy of life, a source of self-esteem, as well as a way to evaluate the worthiness of oneself and others.

As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 97) claim, this kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity highlights how self-criticism and self-improvement, typical of the modern bourgeois process of individualization, is today mainly a response ‘to demands for authenticity and freedom, which have historically been articulated in interrelated fashion by the “artistic critique”; and that it sets to one side the issues of egoism and inequalities traditionally combined in the “social critique”’.

Hence, although connected to it, individualization can be usefully distinguished from individualism. Individualism is commonly understood as a personal attitude or preference; it refers to the weakening of bonds of solidarity and the concomitant entrenchment of the idea that, in order to be successful, individuals can only ‘bowl alone’ (Putnam, 2000). It stresses that modern competitive societies with their insistence on the independent individual are promoting the disposition to be a ‘loner’, a free rider. In this view, individualism pushes persons to be egocentric, narcissistic and competitive in order to affirm their uniqueness (Lasch, 1979; Lipovetsky, 1983; Mau, 2015). Rivalry, meritocracy and moral relativism become the compass that guides individuals in the solitary battle for the affirmation of individual autonomy and success (Flanagan and Lee, 2003).

Individualism is a possible (but not necessary) consequence of individualization. Although there is an obvious and close link between the two concepts, it is theoretically and analytically useful to maintain a clear distinction between them. The drive for individualization does not necessarily equate to a relentless drive for individualism and self-referentiality (Elliott and Lemert, 2006; Martuccelli, 2010). Individualized persons are not necessarily isolated individuals; rather, they are involved in creating social relationships of a new kind that take account of individuality and require the individual’s capacity to act as an autonomous agent. People need others to be able to constantly improve their selves and increase the skills necessary to cope with everyday uncertainties. They are thus constantly subject to the tension between, on the one hand, being protagonists and relying only on their own strength, and on the other, awareness of their shortcomings, the weakness of their personal means in the face of risks, uncertainties, powers and dynamics that are systemic.

The focus on oneself, on one’s own autonomy or self-realization cannot be separated from the kind of social bonds in which a person is involved; structural tendencies towards individualization are always reworked and adapted to the level of experience, attitudes and personal expectations. As we shall highlight in the following sections, this can foster new forms of cooperation among individualized subjects facing common experiences of uncertainty and complexity, precariousness of work and isolation. If individualization is the common historical and structural background, the entrepreneurial self can be reflexively criticized and tempered by collective experiences of ‘self-cooperation’.

A substantial number of works have focused on the logic of individualization, and on how institutions (Fernández-Herrería and Martínez-Rodríguez, 2016; Genov, 2018), education (Down, 2009; Peters, 2001), welfare agencies (Kallinen and Häikiö, 2021; Wright, 2016), labour market (Atkinson, 2010b; Farrugia, 2019), political and media discourses (Howard, 2007; Littler, 2017), experts (Rose, 1998), guidebooks and popular advice books (Bröckling, 2016) combine to promote an entrepreneurial self. Converging in this notion are historical institutional processes of individualization and cultural expressions of individualism typical of the neoliberal environment. Yet this convergence enhances heterogenous pathways. In sections four and five, we add empirical insights to the exploration of the entrepreneurial self among young people: the strategies that they adopt to cope with uncertainty, and the constant pressure to be autonomous, creative, flexible, as well as the aspiration to create new forms of cooperation that they then develop.

Research and Methods

The neoliberal setting frequented by the generation of young Italians that we considered concerns a particular institutional context, at least in part different from that of other European countries. In particular, the issuance of public debt has caused a gradual recession for 20 years. It has deprived the State of any instrument that could mitigate its impact by strengthening the welfare state and preventing the impoverishment of the public school–university system. Thus, neoliberalism in Italy has raised inequality to record levels, with an employment rate of just over 50% of the labour force and wages among the lowest in Europe. Moreover, a discourse reproduced as much by the national mass media as it is exploited by various political parties has reinforced a rhetoric of individual choice and superimposed the figure of the consumer on that of the citizen.

With regard to the effects of these policies, the Italian context certainly resembles other situations in Europe and beyond. In fact, the main issue concerns how neoliberalism promotes the assumption that the free market is a fair system where the talented and hard-working can overcome all obstacles and achieve greater success (Brown et al., 2011). However, since the perceptions of choice and control are necessarily related to the distinct institutionalized pathways that are available to young people, it is important ‘to explore the individualization thesis with caution and through a highly contextualized lens’ (Franceschelli and Keating, 2018: 5). Adopting this perspective, we based our empirical analysis on the belief that the distinctive features of the Italian institutional context could enable us to grasp unprecedented aspects of individualization processes.

The research was conducted in Milan from 2017 to 2019 by carrying out 40 in-depth interviews with young people. We recruited participants in three main ways. First, we began with convenience sampling by contacting three secondary schools, which garnered 26 interviewees: 14 of them were lyceum students, and 12 of them attended vocational school. Ten other respondents were young people that we reached by spending time with a group of university students active in a squatted social centre. Finally, by means of snowball sampling, we located the final four interviewees among young adults engaged in political parties. Overall, the recruitment strategy, besides ensuring a basic socio-demographic distribution by gender (22 females, 18 males), age (from 18 to 31) and educational qualification, aimed at obtaining a variety of situations, resources and, in general, social positionings with respect to future expectations and the management of uncertainty by respondents.

The interviews were conducted by the authors. They were audio-recorded and were structured by incorporating some agreed common themes, but they followed the structure of an everyday conversation as closely as possible. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, anonymized and pseudonyms were given. They varied in length, within a range of 45 to 120 minutes.

The purpose of the interviews was to explore three major issues:

All the interviews were read separately by the three authors of this article, who encoded the main themes that emerged (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995). Comparisons were then made among the different encodings, verifying and tuning the encoding process when necessary, and selecting the codes considered most significant. The texts of the interviews were then read again separately using the selected codes. Finally, we carried out a twofold and parallel work of synthesis: on the one hand, for each interview, we prepared a file with the most relevant extracts in relation to the selected topics; on the other hand, we prepared, for each code, a file with a synthesis of all the narrations referring to that specific code. The interpretative work was based on these synthesis files. The familiarity of the researchers with the interviews due to repeated reading and encoding work, however, enabled them to collocate the single excerpts within the more general framework of the interview.

The Pattern of the Entrepreneurial Self

A substantial part of our interviews focused on respondents’ expectations about the future, especially in relation to work and what they considered to be a fulfilling and satisfying life. When asked what conditions and personal characteristics they thought were necessary to achieve this result, expressions such as ‘personal commitment’, ‘effort’, ‘determination’, ‘perseverance’, ‘adaptability’ and ‘creativity’ were most frequently used.

The words of our respondents evidenced their internalization of a strong injunction to be entrepreneurs of their selves (Bröckling, 2016). They considered it a personal duty to cultivate themselves as persons of value (Farrugia, 2019), continuing to work on themselves, with determination and passion, to become what they ought to be: (valuable) individuals. When they expressed the qualities that they deemed necessary to succeed in the labour market and, more generally, in life, the interviewees talked about personal initiative, passion, willingness to take risks, ability to seize opportunities:

[To succeed in achieving personal goals] you must definitely have a great desire to act . . . in my opinion, you must also be stubborn and know what you want . . . because in the end you have to be very determined in life . . . it’s very important . . . because if you don’t know what you want, you can’t ever achieve it. So, you must be very determined . . . and want to keep doing something until you do it . . . wanting to continue by any means. (Elisabetta, F, 20, Lyceum)

[In order to find a good job] in my opinion you must be highly committed . . . that is, I start from the assumption that you immediately see people who maybe don’t want to do anything and if they have to do something, maybe they do it wrong. What you need are the will and in any case the commitment to give of your best . . . You have to be able to constantly improve . . . I am determined. If there is a job to do, I usually don’t shy away from it. Or, if there is a problem, I try to solve it; that is, I don’t leave it there, waiting for it to resolve itself, I get busy. (Paolo, M, 21, Vocational school)

As is explicit, here the vocabulary of ‘commitment’, ‘constantly improving’ and ‘problem solving’ is taken for granted as the language with which to speak about the possibility of a better future. Adopting the self-entrepreneurial perspective, our interviewees often declared that ‘everything depends on you’ or, as Marta (F, 19, Lyceum) stated: ‘if there is no commitment, you will not get anywhere . . . and then you must be determined’. This internalized injunction to do, to be active and creative is not supported by an idea of omnipotence or by the goal of changing the world for the better, of dominating and taming it. It is rather rooted in the idea that ‘not doing’ would be an error and that ‘doing’ is a way not to be left behind or excluded, to prove to yourself that you can make it.

Likewise to Scharff’s (2016: 114) findings, interviewees who stressed the importance of always thinking positively and adopting a positive attitude stated that, notwithstanding moments of difficulty, they trusted in their personal capacity to cope with uncertainties. They expressed confidence that, if they tried hard, they would be able to overcome temporary obstacles. In their narratives, they supported the idea that meritocracy, in the end, is the criterion that prevailed in evaluating the personal capacities and the skills that they were acquiring at school or university.

As other works have shown (Christiaens, 2019; Franceschelli and Keating, 2018), what is important is to believe in oneself and never give up: eventually, ‘personal quality’ will succeed. The meaning attributed to the internalized injunction to be positive, active and constantly improve assumed a slightly different emphasis on the basis of the cultural capital of our respondents, but it did not highlight specific gender differences. Respondents with greater cultural capital, those attending high school or university, tended to interpret the obligation to be proactive and assertive primarily as an injunction to follow their passions, to engage with zeal and involvement in what they were doing. In their narratives, being active entrepreneurs of themselves meant being determined to follow what you preferred to do even if it did not gratify you immediately, in the certainty that the resources acquired – through family, school, social relationships and individual experiences – will be adequate and that, in the end, these investments can be translated into the best profit. Respondents said that they relied heavily on resources acquired with passion: school skills, parental help, travel and volunteering experiences are important resources that can be used with profit both in the professional field and, more generally, in every aspect of life. Cultivating an entrepreneurial self meant collecting as many different experiences as possible, being willing to wait for more favourable situations to arise:

The world of work is so full of competitiveness that I believe that . . . you can be, say, very good, but if you can’t keep going, if you don’t push yourself, if you’re not determined enough, you won’t go anywhere. Obviously, you are successful if you have the determination, but then you must also have the skills . . . so I would say that the determination is the first thing, but immediately the skills arrive . . . that’s why to get somewhere you have to show something new . . . something that someone else doesn’t already have . . . and make people understand why they should be interested in you as a new figure. (Marta, F, 19, Lyceum)

The interviewees who were attending a vocational school and who mostly came from families with less cultural capital propounded the idea of developing an entrepreneurial self by emphasizing more the ability to perform the assigned tasks well and independently. Being able to do it yourself and to do it in a competent, even original way, were considered the most valuable features to work on constantly for full realization of oneself. While for interviewees with greater cultural capital, being entrepreneurs of themselves meant above all exploring their skills, accumulating experiences, testing themselves and developing creativity, for those with fewer cultural resources it meant above all learning to be tenacious, reliable and disciplined.

Here the disciplinary character of individualization processes emerges more clearly. Self-realization means behaving in harmony with the expectations of the context, understanding and accepting one’s position, and performing one’s tasks as expected. Being authentic means focusing on the cultivation of skills related to the mobilization of specific personal characteristics that can be developed into task-specific skills. In this regard, the interviewees often focused on the acquisition of skills and experiences to be included in their curriculum vitae; skills that were often seen as the acquisition of external rules, of practices to be carried out in an orderly way. Self-entrepreneurship meant taking up the challenge of adapting and marketing themselves in the current context of uncertainty, promoting capacities for self-regulation that comprise a strong component of discipline and normalization (Dean, 2003):

I mean, for me the important thing is to have done [well] . . . I mean, if I have the feeling that I did that particular thing well, I am very happy . . . it already is a success. If your boss says it’s okay, I like it . . . for me, it is a success already. Because in any case it means that what you do, you do it well . . . and if it suits you two three times, four times . . . maybe it will be okay also for the rest of your years . . . because if you put your passion and commitment into it, all the things you do will work well. (Roberto, M, 20, Vocational school)

A pragmatic attitude prevails whereby being an adequate person means being an individual who adapts, who accepts situations and gets the best out of them, knowing that s/he cannot radically change them. An entrepreneurial self is not a self that seeks to revolutionize the world – in the sense of a person capable of the ‘creative destruction’ described by Schumpeter (1943) – but a self that is satisfied with managing it and surviving it. Therefore, as Bröckling (2016) and Scharff (2016) pointed out, practising self-management tends to be individualization understood as a narrative collapsed on individual capacities, ‘personal qualities’, commitment and problem solving. In the following section, we shall illustrate how individualization is pragmatically constructed in relational terms, thus producing forms of sociability which are internally differentiated, for example according to the axis of cultural capital.

Strategies to Come to Terms with the Aloneness of Self-Management

In spite of the ubiquity of the rhetoric of the entrepreneurial self, the idea of individualization included in such rhetoric does not completely overlap with the idea of individualism as self-centred closure. The shared and accepted idea of being solely responsible for one’s own destiny, and the taken-for-granted injunctions to self-management are not necessarily translated into the fate of having to do all this alone. While a large proportion of the respondents interpreted the construction of an entrepreneurial self as an individual task in which all the others are competitors because personal success implies victory over the desire for success of others, also expressed were different ways to try to build new forms of cooperation or, in any case, to mitigate the drive for individualism. This can have different facets, where the presence of the others can play different roles.

Conclusion

The findings of our research highlight the complexity and ambivalent nature of individualization processes among the current generation of young people. Having grown up in a socio-economic environment of neoliberalism, they are acquainted with the contradictions of being asked to solve individually problems that are systemic. Self-entrepreneurship is the main response, but some interviewees are trying to find a new balance between individualization as a societal and historical process, and individualism as a self-referential reaction. While the latter can be seen as an inadequate answer to the complexity and uncertainty of their everyday experience, the former seemed articulated in a variety of possible positionings. The findings of this research address exactly such a range of different possible self-positionings along the continuum between, at one extreme, individualistic egocentric closure, and at the other, individualization as a more complex historical process generating as well new forms of cooperation and sharing, in which the others are fully embedded. In the latter case, we found young people who are certainly individualized, but are nevertheless engaged in the effort to enhance emotional and practical connectiveness.

Such connections take the form of a specific form of assembly, where the construction of a temporary ‘common’ does not erase heterogeneity, difference and individuality. Accordingly, it should be stressed that this idea of sharing and connection is in opposition both to an individualistic search for personal solutions and to identitarian relations. For these young people, acting together with others means neither acting in conformity nor ‘bowling alone’. While the difference and the autonomy of the other is taken for granted, the alliance is based on sharing the practical and existential situations of individualization and the emotional experience related to them.

According to the respondents more reactive to the issue of individualization in their everyday lives – albeit with a variety of evaluations – it is through the intersubjective, dialogical cultivation of personal capacities that a public space of sharing is created. From their point of view, escaping the traps of individualism requires spaces of relationship created by connecting individualizations, where it is possible to improve oneself together with others, rediscovering the importance of dialogue and personal dignity. Only in this way is it possible to become individuals able to resist the commodification of the self fostered by the neoliberal culture.

To sum up, our research shows that there are different facets, and different practical approaches, between such more virtuous attitudes and the simple individualistic version of the entrepreneurial self, because the main imperative seems to be that of preventing the transformation of individualized self-management into fragmentation, isolation and fragility. With different strategies, young people are in fact able to distinguish between individualization and individualism, acknowledging the pitfalls of excessive trust in one own’s capacity to get by on one’s own. Although indirectly, the interviewees recognized the existence of individualization not only as a historical process but also as an individual ‘task’, assigning the actors responsibility for performance of that task and for the consequences of such performance (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Because this disposition entails the necessity to develop personal capacities, and to preserve them from possible exploitation by commodification and self-disciplinary practices, some of the interviewees had devised a variety of approaches to cooperation and the sharing of personal experiences. This can be considered an attempt to produce social integration without going back to any unity like a cultural, social or political self-referential community.

The entrepreneurial self, as the historical convergence of individualization processes and individualistic neoliberal attitudes, does not appear to be a monolithic position. The results presented here, even though situated in the specific context of northern Italy, shed light on social processes that can help in specifying the issue of the entrepreneurial self and the related literature. Cultural capital and experiences of civic participation emerge as the main resources with which to develop new forms of individualized connections, alliances and sharing opportunities: that is, new ways to critically perform one’s own status of individualization.